If
good poems offer fresh and idiosyncratic perspectives of the world with
lively and startling metaphors, this second collection of poems by
Alvin Pang is full of them. With City of Rain, Alvin has
undoubtedly filled the shoes of Billy Collins for the Singaporean
literary scene. Rooted enthusiastically in our local, urban context,
Alvin outdoes even the American Poet Laureate himself in terms of the
flashiness of his imagery and the sheer range of ideas skillfully
displayed in so many of his poems.

More serious than they
seem, Alvin's poems both celebrate as well as complain about his
existence within this capitalist city-state, often both at once in the
same poem. The first two sections of the book – Real Estate and Shades
of Light – are made up of such poems. Take the first poem in the
volume, for example, in which the poet takes a satirical stab at our
country's delirious penchant for redevelopment and the Singaporean
yuppie's insatiable desire for bigger and better living comforts:

Real Estate

There's always an off-chance the hype is trueand the city of tomorrow unimaginablyclose at hand: Flying cars, Robo-maids, gleamingtowers strung with hyper-trains and skyways.Or we could slowly invade the empire of fish,learn to breathe water, perhaps wall it offin giant aquatic neighbourhoods...

Alvin's
imagination knows no limits. Even readers who do not fully appreciate
the poem will laugh and gasp at the wild take on alternative worlds and
his ability to make one take a fresh glance at things we believed to be
familiar.

Moving away from the persistent word-play and inane poeticising of places like the Singapore River in his first volume, Testing The Silence,
Alvin's poems now conceal something darker. There is an undercurrent of
anxiety about the worth of our lives behind the routine of the
everyday; what Filipino poet Alfred Yuson calls the 'urban quotidian.'
Readers who avoid depressing themes in poetry are lulled by Alvin's
flights of fancy and accessible humour before confronting disturbing
lines like 'Self-inflicted violence with a toothbrush', 'Your footsteps
/ echo in the hollow air as if they matter' ("Morning Shift"), and
existential questions like 'Where did you stop along your life / and
forget how to live? Was there a wrong turn?' ("Arriving in the Modern
City-State").

Less a criticism of other Singaporeans than one
directed at his poetic persona, Alvin's poems, specifically in the
first few sections of the book, are more playful and questioning than
directly critical, let alone didactic. Take for example, this line,
'Isn't this defeat so subtle, our bohemian afterlife, / token as a
piece of heaven, resounding in seclusion' ("Shades of Light in Holland
Village"). One feels that Alvin's poems desire to be liked; only
obliquely dissing the complacency of our too-comfortable yuppie
culture.

And what is there not to like? Alvin's poems can be
read as stand-up "comedy" (or "commentary") and still introduce new
audiences to the joys and possibilities of poetry. It is only as the
collection progresses that the poems become subtler and more complex;
in other words, more poetic. The themes also move into more troubled
territory. Whether dealing with the sad plight of immigrant workers in
"Made Of Gold" or a young girl's unforeseen suicide ("No Sign Before"),
Alvin shows that he can play on both sides of the fence, proficient
with bright sunshine as well as unsettled shadows. But the poems are
more than simply effective. Take the last few lines of "No Sign
Before", in which he describes the girl's room, concluding with a
devastating comment about our inability to relate to the victim:

The bed, most likely, was well-made, seattucked neatly beneath table, books piled onbooks in unperturbable mounds. Our erroris confounding loss. As if the language of defeatwere an alien tongue. Or needs translation.

Alvin's
propensity for elaborate, evocative description is present in almost
all of his poems. Even in the above poem, Alvin goes on a bit too long
about how the girl's room is not like 'the troubled cell of some
precocious / martyr, secrets carved on a desk's pained skin; sheets
bleeding floor-ward [...]' when a shorter poem might have had a more
cutting effect.

Poems like "Why We Go to Movies" and 'Poem
for an Engineer' bring to mind again Billy Collins' poems at their most
engaging and imaginative without being inaccessible. The latter, for
example, is ironic and self-reflexive about the act of writing poetry,
the pointlessness of it that is its own freedom: 'What do poems know
about / the imperatives of balance and stress, the calculus / of
load-bearing metres?' Yet the poem ends vaguely and rather
disappointingly despite the pleasure most readers will have in reading
it: 'straight / lines on paper that will one day become a bridge, / a
skyscraper, a lighter-than-air miracle.' The poem might be for an
engineer but it says nothing really about the poet and why he writes as
opposed to the work of an engineer; why the contrast and why is it so
interesting that it should warrant a poem? The poem sounds incomplete,
like many of Billy Collins' poems, although many Americans would
probably not notice, having enjoyed so much of his magical turn of
phrases and clever metaphors: how can it be easy to fault a poet after
he has offered such reading pleasure?

These expansive poems
buffer elliptical poems like "A Poet is Instructed by the Death of His
Master". The reader, having enjoyed the previous poems, is now more
willing to read into what is not said in its concise stanzas. Take the
opening:

Know this:what the world providesyou must give away in turn.Forgive its loss.

as well as these unforgettable lines:

Remember you are dying.That your absence is also poetry.

A
richly quiet piece about accepting what is almost impossible to accept,
letting go and forgiveness, it is also reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield's
work. Moreover, Alvin can afford to be as daring as Hirshfield by
saying or directing the reader less, making the reader work harder to
garner her or his own meanings from the poem (for starters, as a minor
example, one could remove 'Know this' from the poem's beginning).

Alvin's
wordiness works against his poems, especially those about love. These
poems suffer from over-abstraction, and read like the less impressive
poems in a volume by Carol Ann Duffy. Take, "The Memory of Your Taste",
for example:

How easily you forget but it was I alwaysto stoop to the cup of you, lace lipto lip, rehearse tongue-twisters like slurpmalleable laryngeal slither [...]

This
poem reads more like a lengthy, academic or literary exercise in
image-making than something that springs from any genuine feeling. Not
to say that the poem is not enjoyable – it is, but after reading such
poems like this and "Sea And Sky", I am left with little more than
admiration of the poet's craft. On the other hand, poems like "In
Transit" remain memorable, fresh and personal in the best sense
with every re-reading precisely because they balance verbal virtuosity
with a real glimpse of the poet's personality. Look at these lines:

[...] in seat 34A,risking thrombosis, with barely enough room to clap,there's time to ponder unseen forces, the invisiblelift beneath all our wings, only the firsthuman century with this luxury of boredom.If the flight were any longer we'd resort to art.

The
tone is slightly mocking, but always kind. The last line in the above
extract reminds me of the best of Stephen Dunn, whose poems often
discover that exact and refreshing equilibrium between a mere anecdote
and a poetic-cum-philosophical statement about life.

Different
poems will appeal to different people. Some will still find Alvin's
pieces neither funny nor poetic, despite their crowd-pleasing
tendencies. But who can fault the poet for simply wanting to be heard
as well as appreciated? In any case, this long-awaited second volume by
Alvin might just be the thing to get less literary Singaporeans – and
there are so many of them – remotely interested in poetry.